iykyk (2025)
Installation. 4 pieces: key safe (MasterLock), self-adhesive document pouch, newspaper, stainless steel clamp, paper serviette.
Specific specific dimensions (Mirror: 5 cm in diameter; Drawer: 10 x 34.5 x 31.5 cm; box: 5 x 23.3 x 22 cm)
BA Collection
Registration No..: 2025.631.4
His practice interrogates modes of spatial appropriation through apparent forms of contamination, exploring how notions of cleanliness and dirtiness function as psychosocial mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. In IYKYK (“If you know, you know”), Matauko enacts deliberate acts of forgetting through sculptural gestures—such as depositing anonymous packages in a museum cloakroom that are then never claimed—to reflect on the Basque Country’s Lost Generation. The work centers on The Night of the Cut Mohawks in 1985, during which 104 punks were arrested during Bilbao’s Aste Nagusia for allegedly violating public decorum through perceived signs of poor hygiene. In this context, the conscious act of forgetting becomes a subversive strategy—an alternative mode of resistance that reveals the violent dynamics between governmental hygienist policies and dissident experiences.
Yon Matauko (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1987) navigates the border between radical gestures and the lazy comfort of late capitalism; between trash and art; left and right; right and wrong. A change agent whose artistic-spatial practice examines the psychosocial factors involved in processes of cleanliness and dirt, understood as mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion. Their work also explores the role of human and non-human fluids in spatial appropriation. Currently, their research focuses on geographies of exclusion and border transgression, investigating how fear of moral and physical contamination shapes the creation of physical and symbolic boundaries. Within this framework, Matauko is examining the HIV/AIDS crisis in the Basque Country, exploring paradigms between hygienist policies and dissident experiences during the 1980s and 1990s.